Sunday Book Review

Hope for Congress

July 26, 2013

To the Editor:

It is disturbing that an ostensibly “progressive” Congressional leader like Barney Frank would tell a fellow Washington insider like the veteran journalist Robert G. Kaiser that “the voters are no bargain,” but Noam Scheiber is guilty of the same type of elitism in his review of Kaiser’s “Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t” (July 14). After conceding that “the great unwashed can be ignorant, irrational and erratic,” he writes condescendingly that “public opinion may not be responsible or dignified, those time-honored establishment virtues. But sometimes it’s our only hope.”

Public opinion is not merely sometimes our only hope — it is the bedrock upon which a democratic system rests. This basic truth is something that all members of the Beltway elite, including Frank, Kaiser and Scheiber, would do well to remember.

JOHN S. KOPPELBethesda, Md.

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To the Editor:

I found myself nodding in agreement at Noam Scheiber’s statement that “Congress rewards sheer longevity, mastery of obscure rules and inoffensiveness to colleagues.”

This was evident in 1977, when I served as a Senate page. I’ll never forget John C. Stennis, a Mississippi Democrat who served for decades in the Senate, was well respected and could get things done.

Then there was the Senate majority leader Robert C. Byrd (Democrat of West Virginia), who was the Senate’s master of parliamentary procedure. Finally, Senator Orrin G. Hatch (Republican of Utah) treated colleagues on both sides of the aisle with courtesy and respect. Who else but the conservative Hatch could manage to get Senator Edward M. Kennedy (a liberal Democrat) to sponsor legislation with him on several occasions?